Past Due (32 page)

“V
ICTOR
?”

I looked up. Dr. Mayonnaise was in the room. Her head was tilted funny, as if once again, when she looked at me, she was seeing an art work that made no sense. This time a Magritte painting perhaps.

“Hi,” I said.

“Are you okay?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Is there anything I can get you?”

“No, I’m fine.”

“What happened to your forehead?”

“A pigeon I kicked flew up and punched me in the head.”

“While you were playing golf?”

“How did you know?”

“You want me to look at it?”

“No.”

“We’re doing everything we can.”

“I know you are.”

“It’s still too early to tell whether the Primaxin is working. Sometimes the lag between first administering the drug and seeing a definite result can be seventy-two hours.”

“Okay.”

“I know it looks bad, Victor, but in these cases it’s the best thing for him. His heart rate is down, his oxygen level up.”

“That’s good,” I said.

“Indicators are promising.”

“I can tell,” I said, as I looked over at my father.

He was out, more unconscious then asleep, which I suppose was a good thing, considering there was a blue tube snaking down his throat. The respirator bellows were drawing and blowing at a steady clip, the heart monitor was letting out a steady bleep. He was being kept alive by a machine while they waited to determine that the latest antibiotic also was having no effect on the disease that plagued him. They were stumped, the doctors, stumped by my father, which put them in the same uncertain place I had stood toward him for the entirety of my life. I wasn’t sure of the reasons for my own bewilderment, Freud would have a better theory for that than I could ever come up with, but I knew why the doctors were confused. They thought they were fighting a mere microbe, but what they were up against was far more virulent. The thing destroying my father piece by piece was his past.

“I’ll inform you if there’s any change,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“Let me get you some Kleenex.”

“I’m okay, really,”

“Your tie’s getting wet.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s indestructible.”

“Handy.”

“Can you do one thing for me, Karen?”

“What, Victor?”

“Can you save his life? Please.”

She looked stricken.

“Can you? Please? Save his life?”

“Let me get you the Kleenex,” she said.

“Okay,” I said. I felt sorry for her, just then, Dr. Mayonnaise from Ohio. It was going to be a long career, fetching Kleenex and going around saying things like
Indicators are promising.
I used to be jealous of doctors, the money they made, the status of their little degrees, the way everyone bowed and scraped in their presence and made it
a point to use the honorific before their names, as if it were a sign of higher nobility.
Excuse me, Lord Wentworth, I’ll have a table for you in a few minutes, but first I have to take care of Dr. Finster. He’s a gastroenterologist, you know.
I used to be jealous of doctors, but not anymore. Dr. Mayonnaise was welcome to it, the money included. Before her time was up she’d earn it.

I sat alone in the room with just my father and my hopelessness for a long time. It was surprisingly peaceful there, with the predictable rhythm of the bellows. Resignation is a very peaceful emotion. I was through, I told myself, it was over. Joey Parma had given me a murder and now I was giving it back, along with his own. It was too hard, I didn’t have enough fight in me. The bastard behind everything had the law on his side and he had won. Maybe I’d be able to save my career, maybe my life would return to where it was before McDeiss called me to the crime scene, maybe I’d finally get my cable back. It was funny how comforting maybe had become. And as I made that decision to give up, finally, my body unclenched and I caught myself once and then twice, my chin falling, my eyes drifting shut before they snapped open in panic. And then I didn’t catch myself, I let myself slide into sleep, beside my father, with the soft rhythm of the bellows.

A nurse shook me awake.

“I’m sorry,” I said as I jerked to a stiff position. “I know I shouldn’t. I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, Mr. Carl. You’re allowed to sleep. That’s not why I woke you. You have a visitor.”

“I’m not a patient,” I said.

“Not yet,” she said, with a maternal smile. “But none the less, someone is here to see you. But he’s not allowed in the room.”

“Okay.”

“You’ll have to go out to see him.”

“Okay,” I said and I did. And he was waiting for me, leaning at the nurses’ desk, hat in hand, chatting away, making the cute night nurse blush.

Skink.

“I
KNEW A
girl once, name of Gwendolyn,” said Skink. “Gwendolyn, not Gwen. She wasn’t one of them thin twigs everyone goes for now. Gwendolyn had breasts like great piles of pudding, they was. I used to love my pudding. Tapioca. With the whip cream. Not no more though, on account of the cholesterol. But Gwendolyn was a lovely girl, nice feet she had, and we had us a lovely time. This was when I was living in Fresno. The girls there they didn’t put on no airs. Of course what kind of airs was you going to put on in Fresno? Still. Gwendolyn.”

Skink and I were in the hospital cafeteria. I had bought a coffee, an egg salad on white, and a bag of potato chips for my dinner. I brought half the limp sandwich up to my mouth and Skink stared at it as if it were some exotic island grub I was sticking into my craw.

“What?” I said.

“Why don’t you just inject a pound of lard into your veins and get it over with?”

I took a bite of the sandwich and, with my mouth still full, I said, “Get on with it, Phil. Why are you telling me about lost loves?”

“Just shut up and listen. So one night I put on the Old Spice, grease back the hair, stuff a handkerchief in the suit pocket, and I’m ready for a night. I picks up my Gwendolyn, takes her to this frilly grease trough, what with candles and a violin. Dinner and a show
and the show, it’s going to be back at her place. So I’m laying on the sweet talk, laying it on so thick my tie is curling, when she ups and says, ‘Philip, we need to talk.’ ”

“You don’t have to go any farther.” I opened up the bag of chips, offered it to Skink. “You want?”

“Don’t be daft. So that’s the last of her, I figure. She’s a good-enough sport to give me a final plow for old time’s sake, but that’s the end. No more pudding for Mr. Skink. The last I figure I’d ever see of lovely Gwendolyn. But I was wrong, wasn’t I? The next night, who’s knocking at my door?”

“Gwendolyn?”

“Just wanting to see how I was doing. I’m doing fine, I says. Good, she says. You want to catch a movie? I thought we broke up, I says. We did, she says. So what’s with the movie? I says. We can still be friends, she says. I wasn’t in it for the friendship, I says. Oh, Philip, she says. Go put on a jacket. And damn if I didn’t. You see what I’m getting at here, Victor?”

“Not quite.”

“I began seeing more of Gwendolyn after we split up then I ever did when we was parallel parking. Every night she’s stopping over or calling on the phone to check on me, make sure I was up and chirpy. One night I even found myself out drinking with Gwendolyn and her flock, some girls what made Gwendolyn look like a queen by comparison and a few other Joes what she also was at one time doing the boink but were now strictly friends. A little too pathetic there, don’t you think? That was it for me. Bye-bye Gwendolyn, bye-bye Fresno. She’s married now with a couple boys in the army, but Gwendolyn, she’s still sending me Christmas cards. You see there, Victor, some girls, they ain’t as interested in the bouncing as they are in the collecting.”

“Okay. So?”

“Your Alura Straczynski, she’s like my Gwendolyn, she is. A collector.”

I stopped eating my sandwich, narrowed my eyes. “What do you mean?”

He took out his notebook, licked his thumb. “You’ll be getting a full report, all names and numbers, along with my invoice. But I
thought you might be wanting a preliminary idea of what I found. Every night she’s Mrs. Straczynski, out with her husband, doing the rounds, like the perfect little helpmeet. But each morning she’s up and out at the crack. Has got her errands to run, doesn’t she? Busy girl.”

“Go ahead.”

“There’s a bloke in a nursing home. He ain’t much for conversation, never says a thing, had some sort of attack that left him like an eggplant, but she’s there every day, visiting, reading to him. There’s a panhandler on the street, his spot is Sixteenth and Locust, and she drops him a sandwich every day, and a kind word to boot. There’s a print shop she has some sort of interest in, not a copy machine place, but a real honest-to-god print shop where they got this huge old press and they hand sew the books they prints up. She stops in every now and then, helping out the staff, sometimes coming out with her hands black with ink. And there’s an invalid woman she pays call on every other afternoon or so and stays a bit. I was wondering about that so I knocked on the door, tried to sell the lady some knives.”

“How’d you do?”

“No sale. Even though it is guaranteed to be the best knife you’ve ever used or your money back. Cutco. I keep a sample case in my car for when I need to go knocking on a door. Tools of the trade, so to speak. Sometimes I even get an order. Every dollar helps. But even without the sale it was a profitable visit. Because there she was, your Alura Straczynski, cooking up something in the kitchen.”

“Are you sure? This doesn’t sound like her.”

“You ain’t getting it, are you. It wasn’t no charity work. It’s like she has all these different family members what she collected. See what I mean?”

“Okay,” I said, and then a thought struck about the invalid woman who had refused to buy the knives.
She is ill,
had said the justice’s file clerk about his wife.
You have disturbed her delicate equilibrium.
“What was her name, the woman Mrs. Straczynski was caring for.”

“Lobban,” he said. “Matilda Lobban.”

“Surprise, surprise. What else did you find?”

“Something good. Something you’ll love. There was meetings and visitors to that studio place of hers. Usually men, but some women too. You was one of the visitors, drinking with her at that bar she’s always at, she likes a drink she does, and then just the other day you going up to her studio.”

“Business,” I said, picking up the other half of the sandwich, taking a bite.

“Sure it was. I ain’t here to judge.” He gave a judgmental wink. “But there was others too. Somes I didn’t recognize. But one I did, one I couldn’t help but.”

“Who?”

“And it wasn’t just one time neither, him climbing up the stairs to that place of hers in the old factory building.”

“Let’s go, Phil. Just tell me who.”

“But it must not have been going on too long, this one, or I’d a seen it before, wouldn’t I?”

It was in the way he smiled his gap-toothed smile, it was in the way his eyes laughed. I saw his grinning little mug and the idea, crazy as it seemed, started forming. I put down what was left of the sandwich.

“No,” I said.

“Oh yes.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“Am I?”

“Don’t.”

“And it’s almost sweet in its way, innit it?”

“Stop.”

“Like a little family reunion. The way your Alura Straczynski, she’s been spending quality time with your—”

“Frigging Eddie Dean,” I said.

It didn’t hit me right off, the possibility.

I tried to figure it, how Alura Straczynski and Eddie Dean might have gotten together. Even though I had decided to give up the chase, I couldn’t help but try to figure it, yet nothing made any sense. A chance meeting on the street? At the same table at some fundraiser
for that rusting old liner he seemed to care so much about? Mutual friends? Kimberly? And I tried to make sense of the way the justice reacted when I told him all that had happened to me. He was my main suspect, absolutely, but he twisted around in a strange pain as if it were all being done to him as much as to me. Nothing but puzzles.

You work with puzzles long enough, your brain gets fried, and everything that had happened the last couple days had given me a pretty good head start. So after Skink left I went back up to sit a bit with my father and tried to think it through and failed. My mind, overworked and congenitally underpowered, went blank. Went blank. I simply sat there and watched my father and read the ever-changing lines of data on the monitors and listened to the sad iambic song of the respirator, in out, in out.

And then it came, as if sailing in from a place of great distance, it came, the possibility, first a dot and then a fly and then it grew and swelled until suddenly it burst out of the unconscious and shattered the bland quiet of my conscious mind. And with the quiet was shattered my hopeless resignation too.

“Oh my God,” I said out loud.

I used my father’s phone to make the call, and the party I called was Kimberly Blue.

“We’re taking a trip,” I said. “Tomorrow morning. Early. I’ll pick you up outside your apartment, let’s say at seven. No, not Eddie Dean’s house, your apartment. I don’t want your boss to know what we’re doing. Trust me, all right. Just tell him you’ll be busy with a friend or something and then I’ll pick you up. You said you had some questions, right? I think I know where to find the answers, just so long as you let me do the talking. Maybe one night. Just south of Boston. The Shoe City of the World, remember? A little town called Brockton.”

A
GREAT
R
USSIAN
writer once wrote that happy families are all alike, while each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Like all oft-quoted lines from bona fide geniuses, it remains a truism beyond question—and yet from the moment I first read that famous first line I had my doubts. Raised, as I was, in an unhappy family that shattered apart before I was out of the single digits, I always believed the exotic and differentiated lives were lived on the other side of the dividing line between happy and not. The happy families I knew seemed to burst with possibilities; the permutations of their varied interests and eccentricities, the diversity of their achievements, the myriad of strange traditions and customs culled from their everyday happiness seemed unending. The life of our unhappy family was stunted and dark by comparison and the families of other kids in similarly unhappy situations had that same dark and stunted quality. The spur for the unhappiness might well have been vastly different in each case, but there seemed inevitably to be alcohol and bitterness about the past somewhere in the equation and it all combined into a palpable atmosphere of failure. You could sense it the moment you walked in the door. It made your scalp tingle.

I found myself on familiar terrain in the Greeley house on Moraine Street in Brockton, Massachusetts. The glorious stone
houses on Moraine, north of West Elm, were still standing as described by Eddie Dean, but the Greeleys no longer lived way up there. They had moved to a section of Moraine south of West Elm, a less prosperous section crowded with sagging old Capes and dark little cottages desperately needing their sidings painted and their lawns mowed. Something fierce and unyielding as time itself had batted the Greeleys down to the lower rungs of Brockton’s class ladder.

“Nothing was ever good enough for my baby,” croaked Mrs. Greeley in her harsh smoker’s voice, sitting back on her couch, legs crossed, arms crossed, lit cigarette pointing up, its smoke rising mercilessly to the ceiling.

How is one to take such a line? Nothing was ever good enough for my baby because he was the light of my life, the seed of my soul, my very heart? Or, nothing was ever good enough for my baby because he was a greedy little bastard who always wanted more more more? It seemed Mrs. Greeley had intended to say the former, but her posture, the rasp of her voice, the upward curl of her upper lip betrayed her.

“Nothing was ever good enough for my baby,” said Mrs. Greeley and I felt her resentment like a twitch in my back.

What was it that got to me, because being in the Greeley house surely got to me. Was it the fine furnishings with sags in the seats and grease stains on the armrests, with rings like trophies on the wooden surfaces, furnishings that bespoke with utter clarity of a fall from grace? Was it the fine layer of dust over everything that declared the Greeleys had given up even the appearance of trying? Or was it the woman sitting across from me with arms crossed and legs crossed, wishing we would just stop talking about her missing son and go away so she could have another drink? Oh yes, I could sense it in her, the crushing need for a drink, a need that was no doubt far more her lifelong companion than her husband. It was in the way she held her head so carefully, as if at the wrong angle it might slip off, the way her eyes slid from left to right, the way she made my scalp tingle. I could read the signs, my mother had taught me well.

“I did everything I could for him,” said Mrs. Greeley. She was a tall, thin woman, dressed in slacks and a silk shirt. She had a face like
a desiccated apple and her voice had a Katharine Hepburn shake to it. The cigarette was held in front of her so that the smoke acted as a gauzy shield. “I tried so hard. And for him to just disappear like he did, it broke my heart.” She took a moment to draw a bit more nicotine from her cigarette and to dwell a bit longer in her past. Her face twisted for a moment into a cast of pure bitterness, and then she brightened falsely. “Do either of you have children?”

“Not yet,” I said, shaking my head.

“And you, such a lovely young girl. Are you married?”

“No,” said Kimberly.

“Heavens, what are you waiting for? But then you won’t yet understand about children. They can be so hard to handle when they need so much. Tommy didn’t just want, he needed, if you understand.”

“Tell us about his childhood,” I said. “Was it a happy one?”

“Oh my, yes. As happy as it could be, considering. Mr. Greeley suffered along with most of the town at the economic downturn. We had to sacrifice more than you could imagine to send Tommy to Cardinal Spellman. We gave up the club, then the house. When we moved here, I was in tears, but Mr. Greeley simply said, ‘Shut up, it’s still Moraine.’ But Cardinal Spellman was a fine school, far better than Brockton High with its element. You said you were a lawyer, Mr. Carl?”

“That’s right.”

“Tommy was studying to be a lawyer. At the University of Pennsylvania. Is that where you went?”

“I didn’t get in there.”

“How sad for you. But only the best for Tommy, we used to say. Tommy would have ended on the Supreme Court, or in the Senate, he had that way about him. I suppose such promise is always more difficult to handle, but I did what I could with him. Made my sacrifices.”

The word “sacrifices” was said softly, but still it screeched in my ears. I pictured little Tommy Greeley sitting on his living room floor, watching his mother, her grip tight on her glass, as she berated him over and again about all her sacrifices.

“Did he have many friends?” I asked.

“Oh my, yes. He was very popular at Cardinal Spellman. And that friend of his at Penn, Jackson somebody, with the Polish name. They were very close. Jackson. Never Jack. But we didn’t meet too many of his college friends. He was forever visiting with their families on holidays. We hoped, always, that he would come home but I understood. The invitations were just so inviting. And there was the girlfriend.”

“Sylvia Steinberg?”

“That’s it, yes. Steinberg. For that he went to the Ivy League?”

I swallowed and let that pass.

“How about here, in Brockton,” said Kimberly. “Anyone he chilled with when home for a visit?”

“Chilled, like in a freezer?”

“Anyone here he kept in touch with,” I said.

“Jimmy Sullivan. That’s one friendship I tried to break up when they were still in middle school.”

“Why?”

“Oh, the Sullivan boy might have been quite the little celebrity—I think that was what attracted Tommy to him in the first place—but he was always in and out of trouble and he loved nothing better than dragging Tommy along with him.”

“Is he still around.”

“He works at a sub shop on the north side, I think. Which just goes to show, doesn’t it?” She gave me the address.

I glanced at Kimberly and then said, “What about Eddie Dean?”

“Who?”

“A friend of Tommy’s when they were young?”

“I don’t recognize that name. But it’s so hard to keep them all straight.”

“It would have been when they were still just tykes,” said Kimberly.

“There was a little blond boy he played with, a sweet boy, quiet, followed Tommy around like a puppy, but he moved. To California, I think. You said you had some news about my son?”

“Yes,” I said. “I wanted you to know that the police have reopened the investigation into Tommy’s disappearance. I received information of a confidential nature that has caused them to take another look.”

Her face startled smooth. “Can you tell me what you learned?”

“No, I’m sorry,” I said. “It is privileged.”

“He’s my son.”

“I know that Mrs. Greeley and I’m sorry. But anything you can add might be very helpful to the reopened investigation.”

“I told the police what I knew then, which was very little. Just that he hadn’t called in so long and wasn’t answering his phone. He was very busy in Philadelphia, didn’t have much time for us. But I understood, a mother understands these things. Law school was very trying. He was working so hard. It took all his time and concentration to be at the top of his class.”

“Who told you he was at the top of his class?”

“Tommy did, of course. Tommy was always at the top of his class.”

“Okay,” I said. “And you knew nothing about any business ventures he was in?”

“Not really, but he was doing quite well. He always had a nice car, nice clothes. He said he had made money in something to do with publishing.”

“Do you have any idea what happened to your son, Mrs. Greeley?”

“Of course I do. He died,” she said. “What else could have happened? He’s dead. My son is dead. Dead.” Her voice drifted off as she said the last word, and as her voice drifted so did her gaze, toward the small dining area. “Mr. Greeley went down there looking for him. Didn’t find a sign one way or another, but twenty years of nothing is proof enough.”

“I suppose so,” I said. “So after his disappearance you never heard from him in any way?”

“No,” she said. “Never.” But even as she said it her eyes slid again toward the dining area. It was a small dingy alcove, overwhelmed by a dark table, high-backed chairs, a large dark sideboard with a china hutch above it. The hutch doors were ornately carved, with glass panels to show off the dishes. But there weren’t dishes in there, there was something else I couldn’t quite make out.

“Is Mr. Greeley around, we’d like to talk to him too?”

“He’s at the golf course.” Her nose twitched. “The city course. Every day,” she said with a hard smile.

“Is he a good golfer?” said Kimberly, with a bounce of solicitous excitement in her voice.

“No,” she said.

“You don’t happen to have a picture of Tommy, do you?” I said. “Something we could take with us?”

“I might,” she said, smashing out her cigarette and standing unsteadily. “In the other room. I’ll be right back.”

As soon as she left, I stood and meandered over to the dining area, right to that china hutch. I took a quick look around and then opened the doors.

“My God,” I said softly.

There were bottles, the shelves were filled with them, a score of bottles, all clear, all still sealed, all filled with their magic elixir. Gin. Gordon’s Gin. Same brand, stockpiled over the years, you could tell from the varied rates of yellowing on the seals. So much alcohol. Saved up for a rainy day, no doubt. Wouldn’t want to go an hour without. I bet there were bottles stashed all over that house, in the kitchen cabinets, beneath the sink in the bathroom, under the bed, because you never know. And as we talked about Tommy, his mother couldn’t keep her eyes from those bottles, waiting for us to leave so she could slit open a seal, unscrew a top, pour herself a stiff dose of amnesia. It was all too pathetic to bear.

When Mrs. Greeley returned with a photograph, I was again sitting beside Kimberly.

“This is from his college graduation,” she said as she handed it to us. “I expect it will do.”

Tommy Greeley, as his mother surely wanted to remember him, handsome and tall in his graduation robe, a mop of black hair falling from his mortarboard and almost cutting off his eyes. And a smirk that was particularly fulsome. There was an insinuation in that smirk, that this was just the beginning. It wasn’t the kind of smile a politician gives, a false, toothy, trustworthy smile, it was something else.
Look what I scored,
it said, his smirk,
look what I pulled off. Aren’t I something, a geeky Irish boy from the wrong side of Moraine, with a brutal father and bitter drunk of a mother, graduating from Penn, off to Penn Law School, with a million-dollar business on the side? Aren’t I the damnedest thing?

“It’s fine,” I said, standing, anxious to be gone from that house, that woman. “Thank you for your time, Mrs. Greeley. We’ll be back in touch if there is any more news.”

“Can I ask something?” said Kimberly.

Mrs. Greeley said, “Of course you can, dear, such a pretty girl. Such lovely skin. I had lovely skin as a girl too. But then you get old and you dry out. Think of an orange squeezed of all its juice. That’s what a husband and a child will do to you. You’ll see, my pretty. So, dear, ask your question.”

“Now think first, before you answer, because this is, like, not a true-false, okay? If your son was an animal, which animal would he be?”

I sighed loudly. “Kimberly,” I said.

“I saw it on TV.”

“I’m sorry for the disturbance, Mrs. Greeley. Thank you for your time. Let’s go, Kimberly.” I was in the process of leading her out of the house when Mrs. Greeley spoke.

“He would be a polar bear, dear.”

“Excuse me?” said Kimberly.

“He would be a polar bear,” said Mrs. Greeley, “because he was always hungry and he roared when he wasn’t happy and he could be very very cold.”